“I know they are,” I grumbled. I let her take another cookie, then repossessed the tin and shoved it under my bed. “Tell me one more time. Where did you come from?”

Mouth full, Ashwini pointed to the sketchbook.

“Mysore? My Mysore?”

Ashwini nodded and swallowed the last of the second cookie. “Yep.”

“How?”

“Well,” said Ashwini, “you know the story of Mahishasura, right? The real story?”

“I know the myth my mother told me.”

“Not a myth,” she said blithely. “The gods, the demons, the old stories? All real. Thousands of years ago, Mahishasura persuaded Brahma to grant him a boon that would make sure no man or god could kill him. Then he gathered his Asura army and seized the Kingdom of Mysore. You know all that.”

“I also know the gods tried to get around the boon by sending a goddess to fight Mahishasura,” I said. “Chamundeshwari.”

“She rode into battle on a lion and killed Mahishasura. The end. Yes?”

“I feel like that’s a no,” I said suspiciously.

She grinned. “Correct. It was not the end. Brahma’s boon wasn’t so easily undone. Chamundeshwari is a goddess, but a goddess is still a god. When she killed Mahishasura, he didn’t die. Not properly. He was banished to a realm between worlds—we call it the Nowhere Place—and he’s been looking for a way back to this world ever since.”

I tried to take this in. Honestly, there was a part of me that still expected someone to jump out of my wardrobe and yell “Gotcha!” because how could any of this actually be happening?

“Say I accept all this is true,” I said cautiously, not sure I was ready to accept it. “How did my sketchbook get involved? What’s so special about me?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Ashwini, an actual character from that sketchbook, replied, “you’re not special at all.”

Um. “Ouch.”

“I don’t mean that in a bad way,” she added hastily. “I only mean this isn’t totally your fault. You’re just a kid, a little girl.”

“I’m not a little—”

“Look,” she said more seriously, “the gods have known the whole time that Mahishasura was still out there. They’ve been protecting every splinter between worlds, every portal. He knew he’d never get back that way, so he figured out another way. He found a path he knew no one would think to protect. Stories.”

“Stories?”

“Mahishasura’s life in the Nowhere Place was sustained by the memory of people here. Every time someone thinks of him, they feed him power. That’s how the gods and Asuras exist. Human memory keeps them alive. Prayers, stories, books, all of it. And Mahishasura realized that if he could claw back some of his power, he could use a fictional version of himself as a gateway, transform that fictional universe into a real one, and create a new portal back into this world. One the gods wouldn’t see until it was too late.”

“And you’re saying that my Mysore is the fictional universe he picked?”